The Draining Lake (5 page)

Erlendur watched Marion sitting in the chair in the living room, breathing through an oxygen mask. The last time he had seen his former CID boss was at Christmas and he did not know that Marion had since fallen ill. Enquiring at work, he had discovered that decades of smoking had ruined Marion's lungs and a thrombosis had caused paralysis of the right side, arm and part of the face. The flat was dim despite the sun outside, with a thick layer of dust on the tables. A nurse visited once a day and she was just leaving when Erlendur called.

He sat down in the deep sofa facing Marion and thought about the sorry state to which his old colleague had been reduced. There was almost no flesh left on the bones. That huge head nodded slowly above a weak body. Every bone in Marion's face was visible, the eyes sunken under yellowy, scraggy hair. Erlendur dwelled on the tobacco-stained fingers and shrivelled nails resting on the chair's worn arm. Marion was asleep.

The nurse had let Erlendur in and he sat in silence waiting for Marion to wake. He was remembering the first time he'd turned up for work at the CID all those years ago.

'What's up with you?' was the first thing Marion said to him. 'Don't you ever smile?'

He did not know what to say in reply. Did not know what to expect from this stunted specimen for whom a Camel was a permanent fixture, forever enveloped in a stinking haze of blue smoke.

'Why do you want to investigate crimes?' Marion continued when Erlendur did not answer. 'Why don't you get on with directing traffic?'

'I thought I might be able to help,' Erlendur said.

It was a small office crammed with papers and files; a large ashtray on the desk was full of cigarette butts. The air was thick and smoky inside but Erlendur did not mind. He took out a cigarette.

'Do you have a particular interest in crime?' Marion asked.

'Some of them,' Erlendur said, fishing out a box of matches.

'Some?'

'I'm interested in missing persons,' Erlendur said.

'Missing persons? Why?'

'I always have been. I . . .' Erlendur paused.

'What? What were you going to say?' Marion chainsmoked and lit a fresh Camel from a tiny butt, still glowing when it landed in the ashtray. 'Get to the point! If you dither around like that at work I won't have anything to do with you. Out with it!'

'I think they might have more to do with crimes than people think,' Erlendur said. 'I've got nothing to back me up. It's just a hunch.'

Erlendur snapped out of this flashback. He watched Marion inhaling the oxygen. He looked out of the living-room window. Just a hunch, he thought.

Marion Briem's eyes opened slowly and noticed Erlendur on the sofa. Their gazes met and Marion removed the oxygen mask.

'Has everyone forgotten those bloody communists?' Marion said in a hoarse voice, drawling through a mouth twisted by the thrombosis.

'How are you feeling?' Erlendur asked.

Marion gave a quick smile. Or maybe it was a grimace.

'It'll be a miracle if I last the year.'

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'What's the point? Can you sort me out a new pair of lungs?'

'Cancer?'

Marion nodded.

'You smoked too much,' Erlendur said.

'What I wouldn't do for a cigarette,' Marion said.

Marion put the mask back on and watched Erlendur, as if expecting him to produce his cigarettes. Erlendur shook his head. In one corner the television was switched on and the cancer patient's eyes flashed over at the screen. The mask came back down.

'How's it going with the skeleton? Has everyone forgotten the communists?'

'What's all this talk about communists?'

'Your boss came to say hello to me yesterday, or maybe to say goodbye. I've never liked that upstart. I can't see why you don't want to be one of those bosses. What's the explanation? Can you tell me that? You should have been doing half as much for twice the money ages ago.'

'There is no explanation,' Erlendur said.

'He let it slip that the skeleton was tied to a Russian radio transmitter.'

'Yes. We think it's Russian and we think it's a radio transmitter.'

'Aren't you going to give me a cigarette?'

'No.'

'I haven't got long left. Do you think it matters?'

'You won't get a cigarette from me. Was that why you phoned? So I could finally finish you off? Why don't you just ask me to put a bullet through your head?'

'Would you do that for me?'

Erlendur smiled, and Marion's face lit up for an instant.

'Having a stroke is worse. I talk like an idiot and I can't really move my hand.'

'What's all this guff about communists?'

'It was a few years before you joined us. When was that again?'

'1977,' Erlendur said.

'You said you were interested in missing persons, I remember that,' Marion Briem said, wincing. Marion replaced the oxygen mask and leaned back, with eyes closed. A long while passed. Erlendur looked around the room. The flat reminded him uncomfortably of his own.

'Do you want me to call someone?'

'No, don't call anyone,' Marion said, taking the mask off. 'You can help me make us coffee afterwards. I just need to gather my strength. But surely you remember it? When we found those devices.'

'What devices?'

'In Lake Kleifarvatn. Does nobody remember anything any more?'

Marion looked at him and in a weak voice began recounting the story of the devices from the lake; it suddenly dawned on Erlendur what his old boss was talking about. He only vaguely recalled the matter and had not linked it at all to the skeleton in the lake, although he should have realised at once.

On 10 September 1973 the telephone had rung at Hafnarfjördur police station. Two frogmen from Reykjavík – 'they're not called frogmen any more', Marion chuckled painfully – had chanced upon a heap of equipment in the lake. It was at a depth of ten metres. It soon became clear that most of it was Russian and the Cyrillic lettering had been filed off. Telephone engineers were called in to examine it and established that it was an assortment of telecommunications and bugging devices.

'There was loads of the stuff,' Marion Briem said. 'Tape recorders, radio sets, transmitters.'

'Were you on the case?'

'I was at the lake when they fished it all out but I wasn't in charge of the investigation. The case got a lot of publicity. It was at the height of the Cold War and it was well known that Russian espionage in Iceland took place. Of course, the Americans spied too, but they were a friendly nation. Russia was the enemy.'

'Transmitters?'

'Yes. And receivers. It turned out that some were tuned to the wavelength of the American base at Keflavík.'

'So you want to link the skeleton in the lake with that equipment?'

'What do you think?' Marion Briem said, eyes closed again.

'Perhaps that's not implausible.'

'You bear it in mind,' Marion said, pulling a weary face.

'Is there anything I can do for you?' Erlendur said. 'Anything I can get you?'

'I sometimes watch westerns,' Marion said after a long pause, still sitting with eyes closed.

Erlendur was unsure whether he had heard correctly.

'Westerns?' he said. 'Are you talking about cowboy films?'

'Could you bring me a good western?'

'What's a good western?'

'John Wayne,' Marion said in a fading voice.

Erlendur sat by Marion's side for some time, in case his old boss woke up again. Noon was approaching. He went into the kitchen, made coffee and poured two cups. He remembered that Marion drank coffee black with no sugar, as he did, and placed one beside the armchair. He did not know what else he should do.

That afternoon Sigurdur Óli sat down in Erlendur's office. The man had rung again in the middle of the night, announcing that he was going to commit suicide. Sigurdur Óli had sent a police car to his house, but no one was at home. The man lived alone in a small detached house. On Sigurdur Óli's orders the police broke in but found no one.

'He called me again this morning,' Sigurdur Óli said after describing the episode. 'He was back home by then. Nothing happened but I'm getting a little tired of him.'

'Is he the one who lost his wife and child?'

'Yes. Inexplicably, he blames himself and refuses to listen to anything different.'

'It was sheer coincidence, wasn't it?'

'Not in his mind.'

Sigurdur Óli had been temporarily assigned to investigating road accidents. A Range Rover had driven into a car at a junction on the Breidholt Road, killing a mother along with her five-year-old daughter who was in the back, wearing a safety belt. The driver of the Range Rover had gone through a red light while drunk. The victims' car was the last in a long queue going over the junction at the very moment the Range Rover raced through the red light. If the mother had waited for the next green light, the Range Rover would have gone through without causing any damage and proceeded on its way. The drunken driver would probably have caused an accident somewhere, but it would not have been at that junction.

'But that's just how most accidents happen,' Sigurdur Óli said to Erlendur. 'Incredible coincidences. That's what the man doesn't understand.'

'His conscience is killing him,' Erlendur said. 'You ought to show some understanding.'

'Understanding?! He calls me at home in the middle of the night. How can I show him any more understanding?'

The woman had been shopping with their daughter at the supermarket in Smáralind. She was at the checkout when her husband called her mobile to ask her to get him a punnet of strawberries. She did, but it delayed her by a few minutes. The man was convinced that if he hadn't telephoned her she would not have been at the junction at the time when the Range Rover hit her. So he blamed himself. The crash had happened because he'd called her.

The scene of the accident was awful. The woman's car was torn apart, a write-off. The Range Rover had rolled off the road. The driver suffered a serious head injury and multiple fractures, and was unconscious when the ambulance took him away. The mother and daughter died instantly. They had to be cut from the wreckage. Blood ran down the road.

Sigurdur Óli went to visit the husband with a clergyman. The car was registered in the husband's name. He was beginning to worry about his wife and daughter and went into shock when he saw Sigurdur Óli and the vicar on his doorstep. When he was told what had happened he broke down and they called a doctor. Every so often since then he had telephoned Sigurdur Óli, who had become a kind of confidant, entirely against his will.

'I don't want to be his damned confessor,' Sigurdur Óli groaned. 'But he won't leave me alone. Rings at night and talks about killing himself! Why can't he go on at the vicar? He was there too.'

'Tell him to consult a psychiatrist.'

'He sees one regularly.'

'Of course, it's impossible to put yourself in his shoes,' Erlendur said. 'He must feel terrible.'

'Yes,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'And he's contemplating suicide?'

'So he says. And he could easily do something stupid. I just can't be bothered with it all.'

'What does Bergthóra reckon?'

'She thinks I can help him.'

'Strawberries?'

'I know. I'm always telling him. It's ridiculous.'

Erlendur sat listening to an account of someone who had gone missing in the 1960s. Sigurdur Óli was with him. This time it was a man in his late thirties.

A preliminary examination of the skeleton suggested that the body in Kleifarvatn was that of a man aged between 35 and 40. Based on the age of the accompanying Russian device, it had been left in the lake some time after 1961. A detailed study had been made of the black box discovered under the skeleton. It was a listening device – known in those days as a microwave receiver – which could intercept the frequency used by NATO in the 1960s. It was marked with the year of manufacture, 1961, badly filed off, and such inscriptions as remained to be deciphered were clearly Russian.

Erlendur examined newspaper reports from 1973 about the Russian equipment being found in Lake Kleifarvatn and most of what Marion Briem had told him fitted the journalists' accounts. The devices had been discovered at a depth of ten metres just off Geirshöfdi cape, some distance from where the skeleton had been found. He told Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg about this and they discussed whether it might be linked to their skeleton. Elínborg thought it was obvious. If the police had explored more thoroughly when they'd found the Russian equipment, they might have found the body as well.

According to contemporary police reports, the divers had seen a black limousine on the road to Kleifarvatn when they went there the previous week. They immediately thought it was a diplomatic car. The Soviet embassy did not answer enquiries about the case, nor did other Eastern European representatives in Reykjavík. Erlendur found a brief report stating that the equipment was Russian. It included listening devices with a range of 160 kilometres which were probably used to intercept telephone conversations in Reykjavík and around the Keflavík base. The devices probably dated from the 1960s, and used valves that had been rendered obsolete by transistor technology. They were battery-powered and would fit inside an ordinary suitcase.

The woman sitting opposite them was approaching seventy but had aged well. She and her partner had not had children by the time of his sudden disappearance. They were unmarried but had discussed going to the registrar. She had not lived with anyone since, she told them rather coyly but with a hint of regret in her voice.

'He was so nice,' the woman said, 'and I always thought he'd come back. It was better to believe that than to think he was dead. I couldn't accept that. And never have accepted it.'

They had found themselves a small flat and planned to have children. She worked in a dairy shop. This was in 1968.

'You remember them,' she said to Erlendur, 'and maybe you too,' she said, looking at Sigurdur Óli. 'They were special dairy shops that only sold milk, curds and the like. Nothing but dairy products.'

Erlendur nodded calmly. Sigurdur Óli had already lost interest.

Her partner had said he would collect her after work as he did every day, but she stood alone in front of the shop and waited.

'It's more than thirty years ago now,' she said, with a look at Erlendur, 'and I feel like I'm still standing in front of the shop waiting. All these years. He was always punctual and I remember thinking how late he was after ten minutes had gone by, then the first quarter of an hour and half an hour. I remember how infinitely long it was. It was like he'd forgotten me.'

She sighed.

'Later it was like he'd never existed.'

They had read the reports. She reported his disappearance early the following morning. The police went to her home. He was reported missing in the newspapers and on radio and television. The police told her he would surely turn up soon. Asked whether he drank or whether he had ever disappeared like this before, whether she knew about another woman in his life. She denied all these suggestions but the questions made her consider the man in completely different terms. Was there another woman? Had he ever been unfaithful? He was a salesman who drove all over the country. He sold agricultural equipment and machinery, tractors, hay blowers, diggers and bull-dozers, and travelled a lot. Maybe several weeks at a time on the longest trips. He had just returned from one when he disappeared.

'I don't know what he could have been doing up at Kleifarvatn,' she said, glancing from one detective to the other. 'We never went there.'

They had not told her about the Soviet spying equipment or the smashed skull, only that a skeleton had been found where the lake had drained and that they were investigating persons reported missing during a specific period.

'Your car was found two days later outside the coach station,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'No one there recognised my partner from the descriptions,' the woman said. 'I had no photos of him. And he had none of me. We hadn't been together that long and we didn't own a camera. We never went away together. Isn't that when people mostly use cameras?'

'And at Christmas,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Yes, at Christmas,' she agreed.

'What about his parents?'

'They'd died long before. He'd spent a lot of time abroad. He'd worked on merchant ships and lived in Britain and France too. He spoke with a slight accent, he'd been away that long. About thirty coaches left the station heading all over Iceland between the time he disappeared and when the car was found, but none of the drivers could say if he had been on board one. They didn't think so. The police were certain that someone would have noticed him if he'd been on a coach, but I know they were just trying to console me. I think they supposed he was on a bender in town and would turn up in the end. They said worried wives sometimes called the police when their husbands were out drinking.'

The woman fell silent.

'I don't think they investigated it very carefully,' she eventually said. 'I didn't feel they were particularly interested in the case.'

'Why do you think he took the car to the coach station?' Erlendur asked. He noticed Sigurdur Óli jotting down the remark about the police work.

'I haven't got the faintest idea.'

'Do you think someone else could have driven it there? To throw you off the track, or the police? To make people think he'd left town?'

'I don't know,' the woman said. 'Of course I wondered endlessly whether he had simply been killed, but I don't understand who was supposed to have done it and even less why. I just can't understand it.'

'It's often plain coincidence,' Erlendur said. 'There needn't always be an explanation. In Iceland there's rarely a real motive behind a murder. It's an accident or a snap decision, not premeditated and in most cases committed for no obvious reason.'

According to police reports, the man had gone on a short sales trip early that day and intended to go home afterwards. A dairy farmer just outside Reykjavík was interested in buying a tractor and he was planning to drop by to try to clinch the sale. The farmer said the man had never called. He had waited for him all day, but he had never showed up.

'Everything seems hunky-dory, then he makes himself disappear,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'What do you personally think happened?'

'He didn't make himself disappear,' the woman retorted. 'Why do you say that?'

'No, sorry,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Of course not. He disappeared. Sorry.'

'I don't know,' the woman said. 'He could be a bit depressive at times, silent and closed. Perhaps if we'd had children . . . maybe it would all have turned out differently if we'd had children.'

They fell silent. Erlendur imagined the woman waiting outside the dairy shop, anxious and disappointed.

'Was he in contact with any embassies in Reykjavík at all?' Erlendur asked.

'Embassies?'

'Yes, the embassies,' Erlendur said. 'Did he have any connections with them, the Eastern European ones in particular?'

'Not at all,' the woman said. 'I don't follow . . . what do you mean?'

'He didn't know anyone from the embassies, work for them or that sort of thing?'

'No, certainly not, or at least not after I met him. Not that I knew of.'

'What kind of car did you have?' Erlendur asked. He could not remember the model from the files.

The woman pondered. These strange questions were confusing her.

'It was a Ford,' she said. 'I think it was called a Falcon.'

'From the case files, it doesn't look as if there were any clues to his disappearance in the car.'

'No, they couldn't find anything. One of the hubcaps had been stolen, but that was all.'

'In front of the coach station?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'That's what they thought.'

'A hubcap?'

'Yes.'

'What happened to the car?'

'I sold it. I needed the money. I've never had much money.'

She remembered the licence plate and mechanically repeated the number to them. Sigurdur Óli wrote it down. Erlendur gestured to him, they stood up and thanked her for her time. The woman stayed put in her chair. He thought she was bitterly lonely.

'Where did all the machinery he sold come from?' Erlendur asked, for the sake of saying something.

'The farm machinery? It came from Russia and East Germany. He said it wasn't as good as the American stuff, but much cheaper.'

Erlendur could not imagine what Sindri Snaer wanted from him. His son was completely different from his sister Eva, who felt Erlendur had not pressed hard enough for the right to see his children. They would never have known he existed if their mother had not been forever bad-mouthing him. When Eva grew up she tracked down her father and vented her anger mercilessly. Sindri Snaer did not seem to have the same agenda. He neither grilled Erlendur about destroying their family nor condemned him for taking no interest in him and Eva when they were just children who believed their father was bad for walking out on them.

When Erlendur got home Sindri was boiling spaghetti. He had tidied up the kitchen, which meant he had thrown away a few microwave-meal packets, washed a couple of forks and cleaned inside and around the coffee machine. Erlendur went into the living room and watched the television news. The skeleton from Lake Kleifarvatn was the fifth item. The police had taken care not to mention the Soviet equipment.

They sat in silence, eating the spaghetti. Erlendur chopped it up with his fork and spread it with butter while Sindri pursed his lips and sucked it up with tomato ketchup. Erlendur asked how his mother was doing and Sindri said he had not heard from her since he'd come to the city. A chat show was starting on the television. A pop star was recounting his triumphs in life.

'Eva told me at New Year that you had a brother who died,' Sindri said suddenly, wiping his mouth with a piece of kitchen roll.

'That's right,' Erlendur said after some thought. He had not been expecting this.

'Eva said it had a big effect on you.'

'That's right.'

'And explains a bit what you're like.'

'Explains what I'm like?' Erlendur said. 'I don't know what I'm like. Nor does Eva!'

They went on eating, Sindri sucking up spaghetti and Erlendur struggling to balance the strands on his fork. He thought to himself that he would buy some porridge and pickled haggis the next time he happened to pass a shop.

'It's not my fault,' Sindri said.

'What?'

'That I hardly know who you are.'

'No,' Erlendur said. 'It's not your fault.'

They ate in silence. Sindri put down his fork and wiped his mouth with kitchen roll again. He stood up, took a coffee mug, filled it with water from the tap and sat back down at the table.

'She said he was never found.'

'Yes, that's right, he was never found,' Erlendur said.

'So he's still up there?'

Erlendur stopped eating and put down his fork.

'I expect so, yes,' he said, looking into his son's eyes. 'Where's this all leading?'

'Do you sometimes look for him?'

'Look for him?'

'Are you still searching for him?'

'What do you want from me, Sindri?' Erlendur said.

'I was working out in the east. In Eskifjördur. They didn't know we . . .' Sindri groped for the right word . . . 'knew each other, but after Eva told me about that business with your brother I started asking the locals, older people, who were working in the fish factory with me.'

'You started asking about me?'

'Not directly. Not about you. I asked about the old days, about the people who used to live there and the farmers. Your dad was a farmer, wasn't he? My grandad.'

Erlendur did not answer.

'Some of them remember it well,' Sindri said.

'Remember what?'

'The two boys who went up to the mountains with their father, and the younger boy who died. And the family moved to Reykjavík afterwards.'

'Which people were you talking to?'

'People who live out east.'

'And you were spying on me?' Erlendur said grumpily.

'I wasn't spying on you at all,' Sindri said. 'Eva Lind told me about it and I asked people about what happened.'

Erlendur pushed away his plate.

'So what happened?'

'The weather was crazy. Your dad got home and the rescue team was called out. You were found buried in a snowdrift. Your dad didn't take part in the search. People said he sank into self-pity and went off the rails afterwards.'

'Went off the rails?' Erlendur said angrily. 'Bollocks.'

'Your mum was much tougher,' Sindri went on. 'She went out searching every day with the rescue team. And long after that. Until you moved away two years later. She was always going up onto the moors to look for her son. It was an obsession for her.'

'She wanted to be able to bury him,' Erlendur said. 'If you call that an obsession.'

'People told me about you too.'

'You shouldn't listen to gossip.'

'They said the elder brother, the one who was rescued, came back to the area regularly and walked the mountains and moors. There could be years between his visits and he hadn't been for several years now, but they always expect him there. He comes alone, with a tent, rents some horses and heads off for the mountains. He returns a week or ten days later, maybe a fortnight, then drives away. He never talks to anyone except when he rents the horses, and he doesn't say much then.'